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This symposium examines the relations between biopower, destination governance and tourism. Biopower, a Foucauldian concept, refers to political strategies based on humanity’s biological features. In the simplest of terms, it is applied via biopolitical mandates that govern life of a given population. Contemporary tourism exemplifies the exertion of biopower over the mobility of travellers, as was evidenced during the COVID-19 pandemic, and to a lesser degree, continues to do so. The role that tourism plays in enabling authorities to enact spatial transformations reinforcing state power, while also indicating potential means of resistance, is foregrounded in this symposium. The four empirical contributions extend biopolitical thought by demonstrating that biopower is instrumental in the practices and regimes of mobility, security, in/exclusion of tourism. In Europe, the Dutch government experimented with enclosed “COVID-safe” tourist spaces. In Macao, China’s border regime screened tourists based on their viral threat capacities. On Naoshima Island in Japan, museums have transformed into infrastructures of bodily control. In Taiwan, flight attendants are grappling with newly emerging forms of biopower shaping the sociality of air travel and their own practices of hospitality. These empirically informed contributions interrogate how tourism figures in attempts to govern bodies at the population level, while uncovering the modes of coercion applied to govern tourists and the spaces they inhabit.

Purpose: Using case study analysis, this paper aims to examine the application of capacity development perspectives, critical towards urban tourism that is inclusive and regenerative. Design/methodology/approach: The study design used a mixed qualitative methods approach underpinned by the inclusive tourism development framework following Scheyvens and Biddulph (2017). This comprised in-depth interviews, focus groups and observational research. A community-based approach was adopted in a diverse cultural and socio-economic field setting. Findings: The findings demonstrate that people who are marginalised hold valuable tacit knowledge and unique skills that can complement expert tourism knowledge and contribute to the development of more sustainable places and inclusive communities. This finding challenges claims that capacity development must occur before their participation. Local government, alongside non-government organisations and community groups, were found to have a significant role to play in ensuring that residents and people who are marginalised are included in sustainable tourism development. Originality/value: This study contributes to the burgeoning discourse regarding stakeholder capacity development and readiness for inclusion in urban tourism initiatives. Importantly, regenerative development approaches are applied within the gambit of capacity development making this a unique attempt to integrate stakeholders into the design and implementation of tourism planning processes that uphold inclusive and regenerative priorities.

Bringing the political geography of tourism to bear on responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, this commentary reveals how the geopolitical anxieties of tourism are mediated by historical geographies of race as well as contemporary geoeconomic relations and the broader pivot to the Asia-Pacific region.

The article discusses the characteristics and the impacts of voluntourism which is a distinct preoccupation of volunteering and travel. Topics discussed include voluntourism is synonymous with secondary school students, gap year takers and university students and ideas of development of social and environmental partnerships.

The term the exotic other is invoked in this paper via the 2016 film, Tanna(Bentley Dean and Martin Butler). Set in the South Pacific nation Vanuatu, Tannais an emblematic rendering of the exotic other through ethnography-inspired film. Film and narrative analysis is a fundamental method used to scrutinise and ponder the discernible and latent discourses evident and this is leveraged through the theoretical framework of cultural diplomacy. Cultural diplomacy has its genesis in its utility as a tool for foreign policy and the promotion of a nation's strategic interests abroad. Cinematic diplomacy underlines the link between film and the representations of people and place and can be considered a subset of cultural diplomacy in that it mobilises and delivers film for diplomatic and bilateral relationship-building purposes. Tannaraises multiple issues including ascertaining the extent to whether essentialising the other 'glamorises primitivity' and if so, what mitigates against this.

The geo-psychological separation from the everyday that is embedded in spiritual travel practices, can be seen as a laboratory in which individuals can examine, consider and practice spirituality in a way that is not always available in daily life. This feature of the tourism experience is arguably the reason for the popularity of spiritual tourism experiences among novices to spirituality-driven endeavours, as well as to those who wish to develop and deepen their ongoing transcendent engagement through and during travel. If spirituality is the goal, traveling seems like an ideal setting within which it can be sought and, sometimes, even found. This Special Issue has identified the emergence of a binary between spiritual tourism performance as intrinsically religious and conversely, as secular practice. Considering secular motivations firstly, it is clear that underlying the many specific drivers are deliberations focused on the self with motives like wellness, adventure or recreation predominant. Conversely, religious motivations for spiritual tourism largely leverage links to religion and are centred on specific drivers that are underlined by religious observance, ritualised practice, reaffirmation of identity and cultural performance.

This paper examines the growth of interrelated tourism phenomena yoga tourism and spiritual tourism - both sit under the wider umbrella of wellness tourism. Tourism has long been linked with spirituality and where this is the case (for example pilgrimage travel), it is considered to pave the way for personal transformation. Linking spiritual tourism to yoga tourism is a fait accompli, as is drawing similar associations with wellness and pilgrimage tourism on account of allied and abiding motivations predicated on uniting mind, body and spirit and these ruminations are central to this paper. More recently, there has been a growing chorus calling for the decolonisation of yoga on account of its commodification and industrialisation, and especially concerning what is argued to be a shift away from its spiritual and transformative tenets. The underlying meaning of the Sanskrit word yujfrom which yoga is derived alludes to the pursuit of achieving a sense of union with something higher than oneself, and this is arguably one of the key drivers for its contemporary acceptance. Linkages between spirituality and yoga tourism through an examination of the motivations of Western yoga devotees in Maharashtra, India provide the canvas for this analysis. The motivations for yoga related travel and the broader implications for yoga and spiritual tourism are discussed. This article draws from two periods of exploratory fieldwork conducted in 2014 and 2015 in Maharashtra, India. A qualitative, case study scaffold underpinned by serious leisure as a conceptual framework (Stebbins, 2001) was constructed.

Frontier tourism is not going away Despite tragedies like the Titan disappearance, tourists remainattracted to the quest for the most unique experiences in the mostremote, uncharted places. In recent years, however, frontier tourism has attracted widespreadattention thanks to the common occurrence of long queues onMount Everest, the trending TikTok phenomenon of crossing the#DrakePassage in Antarctica and the rapid development of spacetourism for the wealthy. The horror of the incident raises questions as to why people engagein risky tourism activities in remote locations and whether thereshould be more restrictions to what adrenaline-seeking tourists cando. [Extracted from the article]